In 1765, the Empress of China was traveling through the southern provinces with her husband, the Qianlong Emperor, when he suddenly cast her out. Within a year she was dead, and the emperor then set about erasing her from the historical record, destroying records and portraits, leaving scholars uncertain even of her name and appearance. The woman known to history as Empress Nara remains one of the great enigmas of the Qing Dynasty, and the cause of her dramatic fall has never been fully explained. She was born sometime in the late 1710s or early 1720s, a member of the Ulanara clan, one of the major Manchu families of northeastern China.
Belonging to the Nubu branch of the Bordered Blue Banner, her family held significant political weight during a period when the Manchu clans dominated imperial rule. Much of what is known about her comes from the Draft History of Qing, an enormous compilation begun in the early years of the Chinese Republic that relied on sources no longer available. That work remains patchy, and its coverage of Empress Nara is especially secretive, leading many scholars to believe that records pertaining to her time as empress were deliberately destroyed to remove all trace of her marriage to the emperor. In 1735, the future empress was appointed second consort to Hongli, the heir to the Chinese throne, by his father the Yongzheng Emperor.
Though she stood behind his first consort in rank, her appointment at such a young age reflected the political significance of her clan. That same year, Hongli succeeded his father as the fifth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, beginning a reign that would last an extraordinary sixty-one years. Known as the Qianlong Emperor, he presided over a period of major rejuvenation, conducting the Ten Great Campaigns that extended Qing rule westward across Central Asia, bringing modern western China, Tibet, and Outer Mongolia under imperial control. For the first thirteen years of his reign, Nara remained secondary consort, overshadowed by the Empress Xiaoxianchun, the emperor’s first wife.
That empress was highly regarded, in part for her enthusiastic support of Confucianism, which the emperor was working to revive through an ambitious building program. She gave birth to many children during the 1730s and 1740s to secure the dynasty, but in 1748 she died prematurely. The exact cause is unclear, though most accounts say she died while on a boat trip, possibly from drowning or sickness. One of her children had died of smallpox just weeks earlier, and it is possible she succumbed to the same disease.
Her death elevated Nara from second consort to imperial noble consort, the rank just below empress. The promotion may have been due in part to her relationship with the emperor’s mother, the Dowager Empress, who favored her and had already secured her a noble consort title in 1745. Three years later, Nara unexpectedly became empress in name, though she did not take up her official duties until 1750, since the emperor, devastated by his first wife’s death, ordered two years of mourning. Once she assumed the role, her obligations became far more complex.
She was required to accompany the emperor on many of his campaigns across China, journeys that were often brutally violent. The Qianlong campaigns against the Zunghar Khanate of Outer Mongolia and the Jinchuan Tibetan people were genocidal in scope. Of an estimated six hundred thousand Zunghars, around three hundred thousand were killed by Qing forces, another four hundred thousand were devastated by the arrival of smallpox, and more than one hundred fifty thousand fled westward into the Russian Empire. Fewer than one hundred thousand remained alive in Qing territory.
How much of this Nara witnessed firsthand is unclear, but she was certainly aware of the scale of the brutality. By the end of the 1750s, the Qing Empire extended as far as the Himalayas, and the Qianlong Emperor was even considering war with the Afghan emirate to push further into Central Asia. The massive expansion brought many Muslims and Buddhists under Qing rule, and as one of the primary figures promoting Confucianism in the empire, Empress Nara was involved in efforts to spread those teachings among the newly conquered peoples of the west. Yet she is remembered less for her role in these undertakings than for the dramatic manner of her downfall.
In 1765, the thirtieth year of the emperor’s reign, the imperial couple set out on a tour of the main cities of southern China, a region the emperor had not visited for some time. It was during this journey that the relationship shattered. A few years earlier, the emperor had fallen in love with a woman sixteen years younger than himself, Lady Wei, and promoted her rapidly. By 1760 she had been elevated to noble consort.
One speculation holds that during the southern tour, Lady Wei asked the emperor to promote her to imperial noble consort, a position that tradition said could not be held while the empress lived. Despite this, the emperor agreed, enraging Nara. Another report claims the rift came from the emperor engaging in multiple orgies with local women during the tour, with the final break occurring when he wanted to make one of these women a consort. Whether either of these stories is accurate remains unknown.
What is known is that Nara’s response shocked those around her. During the imperial tour, she cut her hair short. According to Manchu tradition, this was blasphemous, since hair on the top of one’s head was never cut in that manner unless one was in mourning. It was therefore seen as an attempt to curse her husband and the Dowager Empress.
The Draft History of Qing claims she was dismissed from the tour and escorted back to Beijing, but recent investigations into imperial records show that her fall was not immediate. For a time she continued to receive the same household goods as before, and her staff consisted of five eunuchs and two cooks. But when the emperor returned to Beijing himself, he took clear steps to demote her. Her four major imperial titles were stripped away, her household allowances reduced, and her staff cut drastically to the level afforded to a second attendant, the lowest rank among imperial concubines.
Meanwhile, Lady Wei, who may have been partly responsible for Nara’s downfall, quickly replaced her, becoming imperial noble consort in 1766 and later gaining recognition as the Empress Xiaoyichun. Nara is believed to have died on August 19, 1766, roughly a year after her removal as empress consort, though conflicting accounts place her death at different times. The proximity of her death to her demotion led to speculation that it was not natural, possibly hastened by poison. But she had been sick for some weeks beforehand, and it seems more plausible that she died of illness, though the possibility of foul play cannot be entirely dismissed.
The Qianlong Emperor showed her no respect in death. Where the first empress, Xiaoxianchun, had been mourned for two years, Nara received no such honor. The emperor did not even return to Beijing for her funeral ceremony, remaining on campaign in western China and dispatching his teenage son Yongji to handle affairs in the capital. When one palace official requested that three years of mourning be observed in honor of the former empress, the emperor had him exiled for life.
A much-scaled-down ceremony was held, one not befitting an empress consort. Her coffin was made of low-quality wood, and she was not given her own tomb. Instead, she was laid to rest beside another imperial noble consort in the Eastern Qing Tombs at Zunhua, approximately 125 kilometers northeast of Beijing. The extraordinary circumstances of her life and reign, and the fact that so little information survives that one would expect to find for any empress of the time, have led many to conclude that there was a deliberate effort to expunge her memory from the historical record.
The Qianlong Emperor granted her no posthumous title, which is why she is known to history simply as the Step Empress. The limited records of her time as empress consort, the unclear nature of her maiden name, and the complete absence of official portraits all support this interpretation. The surviving portraits that scholars believe depict her are only guesses; historians remain uncertain. This deliberate destruction of her memory casts doubt even on the accepted account of her downfall in 1765.
Perhaps far more was involved in her demise than the simple act of cutting her hair, no matter how badly that breached etiquette. But the truth remains out of reach, and the Step Empress’s life raises more questions than it answers.